Data Propaganda

What can go wrong when the COO of you company is cornered and desperately tries to fight back? If the ship is in collision course and you can’t blame it on Zuckerberg, Sandberg, blame it on the Iceberg. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the […]

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A very interesting take on how media allows you to spin things and should always be questioned Before alteration or doctoring, photographs and videos impose many unseen prejudices, even before computational manipulation enters the picture. Filming strips acts from their broader context. The qualities of an optical instrument and the film or sensor used to […]

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First call to action from a Silicon Valley firm. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them,” he said. “This should make us very uncomfortable. It should unsettle us. Tim Cook calls for US federal privacy law to tackle ‘weaponized’ personal data – The Guardian […]

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University of Chicago released a few years ago a checklist for data scientists. Some points seem oddly relevant nowadays: Were the systems and processes used to collect the data biased against any groups? Surveys are a common venue for introducing bias. For example, a question about gender that is limited to male or female responses […]

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The information warfare is getting weirder and weirder But there’s another aspect to this that is critical: In terms of information architecture, Gamergate was a signal event—a rally-point for the charlatans and hucksters who would become leaders because they could put words to a previously poorly defined sentiment that was more widespread than anyone wanted […]

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Here’s a great resource: Computational propaganda

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A very interesting take on the impact of social media: “How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump” Zeynep Tufekci – Technnology review Security isn’t just about who has more Cray supercomputers and cryptography experts but about understanding how attention, information overload, and social bonding work in the digital era.

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So the earning calls season it just over. Apple and Facebook and Youtube have much less to fear. Facebook, Apple, YouTube and Spotify ban Infowars’ Alex Jones -The Guardian Most notably, Twitter doesn’t follow… It’s not as if the US President was using it as its primary mode of communication. Wait until the shit hits […]

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WHO KNEW? TSA’s ‘Quiet Skies’ Program Tracks, Observes Travelers In The Air – NPR From Boston Globe: 1. Subject was abnormally aware of surroundings (If observed, check any that apply below) | Y N Unknown Reversing or changing directions and/or stopping while in transit through the airport Attempting to change appearance by changing clothes, shaving […]

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There’s a lot of hot air around Generative Adversarial Networks, and a lot of progress since Goodfellow’s 2014 seminal work. What if this is the way society works? A few years ago (2011) I came across this paper from Hugo Mercier, which somehow made the case for adversarial learning, fully aware of some of its […]

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